My attraction to the collages of Romare Bearden first occurred on the level of sound. His granularized bits of paper and angular shards of photographs resonated like horns and breaks. The severed, sutured and apocalyptic series Sermons: The Walls of Jericho (1964), was for me like looking at It Takes a Nation…[1] in radioactive Technicolor.
I imagine that is what pulled me in. The rushing beauty and immediate urge to communicate and index (but not necessarily classify) the experience of what it is like to entertain the notion of preferring to be a plant (as explained by Archie Shepp in Impulse AS 9222)[2].
[1] Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam Recordings, 1988)
[2] Archie Shepp, Attica Blues (Impulse Records, 1972)
Artist Audio Statement
